Desert Archaeology

Desert Archaeology – version for reading on 8 February at MikeFest[1]

 

Peter Stanley, who was organising a day of celebration at the National Museum of Australia for Mike Smith’s life and work,  contacted me to say  that Mike Smith would like me to read one of my desert poems. He added that Mike would like it even better if I would write a new poem. I then talked to Mike, who told me he thought no poet had yet captured the poetry inside the basic tradecraft of modern archaeology. He challenged me to try, offering ideas and feedback. This poem is the result. It contains numerous concepts and phrases for which I am indebted to Mike.

 

 

Camped near the dig, mug in hand,

Out past the Tarn of Auber

(most unglacial of soaks)

In that three quarters of Oz

“Set aside for mystic poetry.”[2]

 

Country where you count trees to a square kilometre

And trees count the water,

A world of spinifex pixels,

 

Baldwin Spencer saw a people stranded in time

Primitive, but not primordial,

Modern humans, who weren’t.

 

Tindale’s deep bed at Devon Downs had no dates;

But Mike from old fires and toe-bones helped make

A story with dates, and where possible names;

Traced it all forward

To where deep time meets memory, slides into history.

Motives become known; phonemes can be guessed.

 

Walking the land between rains

“Like a clock slowing down”,

Through its hushed-sand places where even to walkSeems an act of reverence, part of

That endless fitting of bare feet to country,

He knew this high tropical plain

The height of a cloud above the coast.

 

– Meeting the ancestors

—That slow gentle shock

As you enter a cave

Praising yourself to have found its refuge;

That first sense, half chill on your spine,

How the dark splotches run together

Till the faint reddish stain

Might just be a euro,

Could not be an accident.

And sudden as if you’d been served with a summons

The stencilled hands remind

That this cave which you’ve found

Is not yours, and not found by you.

 

The cave wall says “I own”

Not “I relinquish”. and art is its “sacred charter”.[3]

 

Mike found or re-found a cave’s deep rock-cap against the sun

In this land on the edge of the monsoon rains,

Reptile and rock-crevice country. And sand.

Iron country, oxidised Martian red

By one vast bath of sun and air.

Land where the spinifex thrusts its needled delusive hay

To clog radiators, setting cars alight.

 

A Devonian sand dune cross-bedded

From the age of fishes, had conceived this hollow.

Puritjarra’s overhang

 

—

Archaeology

Is not one-day cricket but a decades-long test;

Quick conceptions, then a long slow fostering

Of evidence, like rearing and training a wicked child.

A few weeks romance and dig,

Then that long monogamy of writing-up.

 

Layers fade as you rapidly read them

Before rodents or floods get in,

It’s a corpse you dissect till it vanishes,

Each layer of tissue scraped off

Into sketches and words.

 

Invertebrates move sand pixels up and down thin pipings,

Scrambling eras and dates,

Like the ignorant mice that ate Homer.

Rabbits blast through the layers utterly.

 

Dissecting the site is surgery, with washed, dusty hands.

Peeling back the skin, dissecting its rusted

Anatomy —how the nerves connect, bones articulate.

That first trench

Is a manhole inserted intuitively intoTime.

 

Honest tradesmen, of our science-based humanity,

Who keep neat field-books, well-listed and well-labelled finds,

We hope that the past lies underground.

 

A cave is where nature took stuff away.

Why then should it re-deposit earth

To wrap and record later events,

Like thick paper between the strata?

Erosion somewhere, or exfoliation

Must feed a fine dribble of deposit.

 

There are digs like the Grand Canyon’s layers

—More gap than sequence

With four fifths of Earth’s ages missing—

Since hills don’t collect information, they erode,

Losing even what was buried before.

A hill is a black hole in Time.

 

Sand sheets, sometimes finished finely and whitely as art paper

Or coarse and crenellated,

More likely piled up in crannies, laid down in facies

Like a carpet rucked,

Yet all can be written into.

 

Mike reminds us:

What  washes into a cave swirls unevenly.

Remember too that whatever

Was once dug out has been spread again.

Look for artefacts eroding out on the dripline!

 

A fireplace to keep sleepers warm is one-night’s history,

and of thousands of nights super-posed

What remains?

 

In our prayers, nature makes a steady deposit

Of smooth sand for millennia.

100 years in a spit is large-print history.

10,000 years in 4 millimetres is telephone-book fine.

 

But an eroding site, like a blackboard ever-erased,

Leaves a palimpsest of eraser-scratches.

200 years of goanna, wallaby, fish and their ashes

Scraped clean and re-applied.

Like a seismograph whose paper’s jammed,

The years of data over-print

To a charcoal smudge, undatable.

 

Reading it is like telling a school’s history

from what the blackboard showed on the last day.

 

–          

The archaeologist’s drive to make meaning

Meets the myth-makers on their home ground.

–         –

 

So does the work end

In a book-choked study,

A time-travelling dream before dawn,

Coffee in hand,

Staffies snoring on your feet,

That becomes a vision, a linking hypothesis

That might take a century to prove?

Or in something pragmatic?

Perhaps a draft for a Minister, now it seems on-side,

About the First Peoples’ claim to lands

For a Constitution’s preamble?

 

. . . Well, we will go on searching.

 

—Mark O’Connor 2013